1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to customer information management, and more specifically to methods, systems, and computer program products for anonymous exchange of customer information between business entities.
2. Background Art
Business entities store customer information for a variety of business objectives such as customer profiling, targeted advertising, designing custom promotions, and the like. For example, business entities with advertisement driven revenue models, such as search engines or free email service providers, may store information about the customer's interest in various product or service categories to show them relevant advertisements. Similarly, a tour and travel service provider may store its customer's frequency of travel, preferred destination categories, budget per trip, and the like, to analyze the profile of its customers and offer appropriately tailored holiday packages. Banking and Financial services (BFS) providers may store information about their customer's spending segmented by product/service segments, the time/frequency of spend, and the like. The BFS providers may use this information, for example, to expose the customer to promotions for relevant products and services, particularly at the time of the month when the customer is most likely to make a purchase. Advances in information technology have offered business entities increasingly convenient ways to collect, manage, and analyze such customer information to better achieve their business objectives.
In many instances, business entities may desire to exchange information about customers that they have in common. This may help the entities to augment their knowledge of their customers and take better business decisions. For example, consider a tour and travel service provider that has certain customers in common with a BFS provider. The tour and travel service provider may store information about the holiday preferences of these customers such as whether they like to visit beaches, ski resorts, or big cities. The BFS provider, on the other hand, may store information such as annual income or annual spend on various products and services. If these two entities share their customer information, the tour and travel service provider may learn, for example, that the customers who like to visit beaches usually have a lower annual income. The tour and travel service provider may in turn choose to develop relatively low cost beach vacation packages to boost sales in this segment.
However, the customer information held by business entities is often confidential. More particularly, the business entities often cannot disclose Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of their customers. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) includes any information item, or a combination of more than one information items, which uniquely identifies the associated customer. Examples of PII include the customer's e-mail address, social security number (SSN), mobile phone number, and the like. Other examples of PII include combinations of one or more of the customer's name, mailing address, date of birth, and the like. In some instances, the customer's PII may be subject to privacy regulations. Further, the business entity may have a contractual obligation not to disclose their customers' PII. In addition, a business entity may decide not to share their customers' PII with other entities due to business considerations irrespective of regulations or contractual obligations. For example, the entity may want to be viewed as an organization that maintains a high level of customer privacy. Further, the entity may not want other entities to gain detailed information about its customers for competitive reasons.
Therefore, business entities often involve a third party for the exchange of customer information with each other. The third party receives customer information, including PII, from all participating business entities that wish to exchange customer information. The third party then identifies common customers of the participating business entities using the customer's PII, and creates an anonymous record for each common customer. The anonymous record includes the customer's information from the two or more participating entities, but does not include the customer's PII. The third party may then share such anonymous records with one or more of the participating entities without violating the customer privacy of any entity.
However, this solution requires the participating entities to share their entire customer information with the third party. This often requires the transfer of large volumes of data between the participating entities and the third party. The transfer and processing of such large volumes of data may require a large amount of network and computing resources, and may lead to delays in the information exchange process. In many instances, the aforementioned factors may be significant enough to call the feasibility of the information exchange process into question.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need in the art for an efficient and scalable method, system, and computer program product for sharing customer information between business entities within the associated privacy constraints.